


the magpie comes at noon

by John the Alligator (Chyronic)



Series: Magic A/B/O Trainwreck [1]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Abuse of Power, Alpha Tezzeret, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Art Chat Industries Presents, Beta Kallist Rhoka, Collars, Dissociation/Dysphoria, Emotional Manipulation, Erotic Electrostimulation, Extremely Dubious Consent, Fingering, Hand & Finger Kink, I am the shadow that stalks the Art Chat by which I mean my shit's dark, Illusions, M/M, Masturbation, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Multiple Orgasms, Omega Jace Beleren, Oral Fixation, Porn With Plot, Slow Burn, Sort of? - Freeform, Tags will be updated as needed, Violence, a motley assortment of telepath problems, is this a dead dove: do not eat kind of situation? my frame of reference is fucked, set during AOA
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 01:42:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6175255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyronic/pseuds/John%20the%20Alligator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>A bartender brushes hir fingers over Jace’s knuckles and he jerks with the shock to his neck and dumps half his glass onto the bar. Someone in the street throws a wild punch that gets Jace in the jaw and he sits down on the pavement, hands twitching uncontrollably. Kallist grabs his hand or claps him on the back, and the pain stops Jace’s breath. </i>
</p><p>  <i>It’s safe as long as where people touch him is covered, and so it’s just as well that Jace feels naked when he’s wearing less than three layers; by and large it’s served him well. He’s getting along fine.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Realized I had five finished chapters from NaNo. Updates will be slower from here on out.
> 
> I think this is Dead Dove: Do Not Eat territory. If you want something significantly healthier and more consensual, go look in TJ's direction.

Jace is in his room, which is unsurprising, and is probably asleep, which is barely surprising. It’s midway through the afternoon, but Kallist knows Tezzeret called him yesterday, and after that Jace is almost always at least two of drunk, exhausted, or miserable. Though that raises the question of why Tezzeret is having Kallist do this, if he just saw Jace. Krokt only knows what goes through that man’s head; best not to wonder.

Kallist admits to himself that he is stalling. He turns the device over in his hands again. “Device”—it’s a _collar_. It’s beautiful workmanship, as odd as “beauty” applying to anything Tezzeret makes is. The leather’s soft enough that it flows over his fingers like cloth, though there’s etherium contact plates on the inside and probably wiring between the layers of leather. Examining it won’t tell Kallist anything; he’s not a mage, let alone an artificer. But whatever it does, he doesn’t want to find out, and he doesn’t want to be responsible. What possessed Tezzeret to choose him as an errand boy?

With one last worried sigh, Kallist swallows his misgivings and shoulders the door open. He’d knocked vigorously before giving up and using the key Jace gave him. Even with permission, it felt _off_. Everything about the situation feels off.

The sound of the door makes Jace startle. Kallist knows better than to expect that it’ll actually rouse him; he picks Jace up by the ankle and shakes.

Jace makes an assortment of whining noises that eventually form into words. “Kallist?”

He grins in spite of himself, in spite of everything. “Yeah? Back to the land of the living?”

“’S it morning already?” Jace groans.

“No,” Kallist says. “But Tezzeret sent me—“

Jace flinches. He flinches _hard_ ; Kallist couldn’t have ignored it if he tried, and he was trying. “No, it’s too soon, he just _had_ me, he can’t—“

“Jace!” Kallist snaps, making his voice harsh because it’s the only thing he knows that will make Jace stop for long enough to get a word in. “I’m a glorified messenger.” (The sharpness carrying over is unintentional. He’s more irritated than he’d thought, worry finding an outlet in anger.) “He doesn’t need you, I just have to give you this, it’s okay.”

Jace relaxes so quickly he almost goes limp. “Okay. What is it?”

Kallist tries not to curl his lip. “Some artifact. I’m supposed to put it on you.”

“As long as it means he doesn’t need me,” Jace says, mustering a grin.

“Yeah.” Kallist belatedly sits down on the side of the bed, then blurts out, “It needs to go around your neck. Sorry.” So much for tact.

Jace sits up and tilts his head back unquestioningly, and it _hurts_. Kallist doesn’t know what he’s doing to his friend, only that it’s going to be bad, and he’s trying to block out everything that would make it worse and failing. Jace smells like fresh water and new leaves, strongly enough now and here—in his room, having spent half the day in bed—that even to Kallist it’s obvious, and he’s still too dulled by sleep (and, Kallist realizes with a pang, by all likelihood lingering pain) for there to be any suspicion in his eyes, even the normal amount. He’s looking at Kallist through the mess of his hair and still smiling slightly and Kallist wants to touch him so _badly_ —

He exhales. Counts: one, two, three, until he can trust himself to breathe in again. “Okay,” Kallist says, largely to himself. This is only going to get harder.

When Kallist brushes his fingers against the side of Jace’s neck—by accident, even—Jace leans into the touch on apparent reflex, the side of his face nudging against Kallist’s wrist. Kallist swallows and tries to make it quick, getting the collar on him and buckling it as fast as he can with his hands shaking slightly. As soon as the buckle’s done up the tongue seems to meld into the rest of it, forming a closure more thorough than any lock.

This is wrong. This is so _fucking_ wrong, and Kallist can do nothing about it, and it’s increasingly clear Jace knows no better.

“Is that okay?” Only when Jace tilts his head further into Kallist’s hand does he realize he hasn’t moved. (When he pulled the collar tight, Jace went still and silent. It is not okay.)

Jace swallows, then nods (his skin is soft and warm and he’s so easy to hurt and it’s horrible). “It’s… weird, but not uncomfortable. Any idea what he wants from me?”

“No clue,” Kallist says honestly. In the back of his mind he feels a spike of desire that seems foreign, external, but on momentary examination that’s ridiculous. It’s him, him and his stupid crush when he can’t even manage to protect Jace as a friend. He pulls his hands back. “I should go.”

Jace bites his lips, then nods. “I should get more sleep.” (What did Tezzeret _do_ to him?) “It’s—Kallist, it’s okay, you just did what he told you to. It’s fine. Whatever Tezzeret wants, it’s not worth getting you in trouble. I’ll figure it out.”

Kallist nods, can’t force words. He leaves in a hurry.

He doesn’t have the heart to tell Jace he’s already in trouble. Kallist is a beta and even he can tell the scent of fresh water and pale green things is clinging to him. This is going to be bad.

 

* * *

 

It’s bad.

The ominous sign flavor of the day is calm, instead of rage. Kallist doesn’t deal with the boss himself often enough to know if that’s better or worse, if Tezzeret is more dangerous when he doesn’t think through what he’s doing or when it’s exactly planned. The only reason he’s interacting with the man so much is that Kallist has been sort of pulled along in Jace’s wake. Which he doesn’t resent—it’s better than Jace being in this alone, as shit protection as Kallist is being—but…

“I did it,” Kallist blurts out, since Tezzeret seems to be ignoring him, back turned as he fiddles with something that glows softly. Kallist’s hand flickers toward his sword at the condescending display of conspicuous vulnerability; fuck alphas, fuck Tezzeret in particular, fuck this entire situation. “ _Sir_ ,” he adds, spitting the word.

His guess that it would be an insult and a deniable one seems to hold true. Tezzeret turns at that, finally, sets down the glass and metal orb he was working on and crosses to Kallist. Worryingly close. Arm’s-breadth close, for someone his size.

“Rhoka," Tezzeret says mildly. “What do you want?”

Kallist snaps. “I don’t know what you’re doing to Jace but I will not be party to it and I am not your errand boy,” he says—yells—the words falling out of his mouth in a rush.

Somehow without moving Tezzeret gets colder, grows taller. His lip twitches. “I don’t pay you to second-guess me.”

A scent that’s more concept than sensation, ozone and malice, is forcing a headache up behind Kallist’s eyes. He clenches his fists. “I don’t work with you to hurt my own.”

“Your own.” Tezzeret’s eyes flick across him dismissively. “I see.”

Then Kallist is reeling, catching himself with a hand slammed painfully into the floor. His face throbs. The past few seconds resolve: Tezzeret hit him, hard, hard enough to knock him over but, Kallist realizes, with his flesh hand, not his metal one. His cheek feels torn, but that’s just from Tezzeret’s knuckles hitting his teeth; his face isn’t laid open like he could’ve done with the claw. Small mercies.

_Mercy._

Right.

Tezzeret observes Kallist for a moment, then drops to one knee so their faces are closer to level. “I suppose the fault is partly mine for expecting you could infer the rules from context, so I’ve gone easy on you. Consider this a warning.”

“Against what?” Kallist snarls. He’s at least going to make Tezzeret say it, for all that Kallist thinks he knows.

“Shall I say ‘inappropriate fraternization’?” Tezzeret says, almost kindly. It makes Kallist’s skin crawl. “I can smell him on you. Keep your hands off my things.”

(The ‘filthy’ seems implicit.)

“You sent me,” Kallist grits out. “And he’s not a _thing_. He’s a person.”

Tezzeret reaches over and knocks Kallist to the floor. There is no violence to the motion, no unnecessary force. He stands. “He’s a tool. A weapon. Remember that. Now get out.”

Half Kallist’s face feels like one huge bruise. His skin’s hot with rage; his mouth’s hot with blood. His hands shake.

There’s nothing he can do, he thinks dully. The knowledge throbs in time with his cheek. But he’s giving in so _easily_ …

Hating Tezzeret, hating himself, Kallist goes.


	2. Chapter 2

Jace can’t get back to sleep. He tries. The unfamiliar weight of the collar around his neck won’t let him settle into unconsciousness. He wasn’t lying to Kallist; it’s comfortable enough. But he can’t stop tracing his fingers over it, trying to dip them under the edges and failing, feeling out what it does to his body, a hard line resting at the base of his neck. He’s sleepy enough to feel like his head’s floating, disconnected from the rest of him. Which is, admittedly, preferable to the early bone-deep ache.

The buckle seems to have fused to itself; Jace can’t get it off. He shudders whenever he’s reminded, though he’s having trouble keeping thoughts in his head. It fits him closely enough that when he hooks a finger into the metal loop at the front—he is not going to think about that at all—it’s as if he were pulling his whole neck forward from inside. And… he hopes he’s wrong. He really hopes he’s wrong. Let the sharp jolt of pain when Kallist touched him be a coincidence, be a flaw in the construction, be anything but by design…

A flaw in Tezzeret’s workmanship that he let pass into someone else’s hands. Yeah, right.

Jace starts actually shivering. People don’t touch him anyway. Not only does Tezzeret have no reason to care, he has no reason to provide a disincentive. Not when Jace gets so little human contact that a few strokes to his neck left him hard.

He’s trying to ignore it.

Kallist had no reason to know what he was doing. Not all omegas would react like this, and Kallist thinks Jace is a beta, anyway. But his hands were warm and callused and— _safe_ , and he smelled so good. Jace is used to Kallist’s scent, used to it meaning safety; he’s never reacted like this before. He hasn’t thought about Kallist like this at all. But his shields were all down, even the ones that he usually manages unconsciously, meaning his own senses weren’t dulled either.

The collar puts continuous light pressure on the softest parts of his neck, the vulnerable skin where someone could easily kill or mark him, just insistent enough to be impossible to ignore.

It was all he could do to not let something slip. And now he can’t stop _thinking_. If he’d… not begged. Asked. Asked Kallist to stay. His friend probably would’ve. Jace could have just… swallowed his pride enough to ask for contact. (Normal people, real people, they do that, right? They touch each other, because they want to, without violence?) Kallist had never smelled that good before, worn sun-warmed leather and clean sharp metal and safety. Maybe he’d want Jace, even, if Jace asked. Maybe.

Jace wraps a hand around his cock loosely and has to stifle a scream with his other hand. He’s barely touching himself, but he’s been hard and leaking and trying to ignore it since Kallist got the accursed thing buckled. The shift in angle presses the collar insistently into his throat, and Jace lets his eyes slide shut and curls in on his side.

He tightens his grip and can’t keep from whining, presses the heel of his hand into his mouth. Maybe Kallist would hold him by the throat, like this, gentle but unbreakable, if Jace asked. Not enough to be sexual in and of itself—would that still be too much? Jace strokes himself slowly, gasping into his hand. Kallist could do more than that if he wanted, Jace thinks with a sudden wildness. He shoves his fingers into his mouth to see if that stifles the noise any better, imagines how Kallist’s scent would linger anywhere he touched. But even if he took great greedy palmfuls of the skin Jace would offer him the scent would dissipate in a few hours. That’s not _enough_. If Kallist marked him, though—

Jace shudders as he comes; it leaves him spent and gasping but not finished. He’s a sticky mess, of course, but he thinks he might be actually wet as well. He gives his fingers one last suck and carefully reaches down, hooking a single finger into himself though his arm strains at the angle. Jace isn’t in heat, so that much penetration is about the high end of what he can stand, but he’s wet enough to take it. He squirms back on his own hand, suddenly more desperate than he is tight and oversensitive.

People like omegas. Jace knows this, academically; it’s a physiological effect. Maybe he should tell Kallist? Maybe he’d want to. To.

He’s barely half-hard but when he tugs on his cock once, twice, finger twisting inside himself, Jace comes again, thrashing against the bed. The aftermath brings some level of calm. He can think.

The wash of embarrassment at the thoughts he just had about his best friend is excruciating. In its wake, he tries to consider himself critically, emotion aside.

That he can remember, Jace has never thought about Kallist romantically or sexually before. Jace likes him, of course, cares for him, but that’s all. That’s been all. He forces himself to set the shame and guilt aside and consider it evidence. He was attracted to Kallist, and his body let him take a finger, and… And he just came twice and could probably go again, though the need has passed.

Fuck. _Fuck_. He does know what that means.

Jace will be in heat by the end of the month. If he’s lucky.


	3. Chapter 3

In the end Jace has about three weeks. It’s long enough to prepare somewhat, long enough to let shame and laziness drag at him so he makes mistakes.

Long enough to figure out the collar is exactly what Jace was afraid of.

People don’t trust Jace; they barely look at him. Outside the Consortium he’s wallpaper. Within the consortium he’s isolated by age, being a mage and a planeswalker, and by being close to Tezzeret. People’s fear of Tezzeret rubs off on Jace with the paradoxical kick of resentment at some teenager having this kind of power. There are two species of reactions he overhears, for all that Jace tries not to listen: _What did he do to deserve that?_ and _What’s he going to do to me?_

(Nothing. Jace isn’t going to do anything Tezzeret doesn’t make him. He wishes he could tell people. He wishes it would help.)

But no one is perfect. A bartender brushes hir fingers over Jace’s knuckles and he jerks with the shock to his neck and dumps half his glass onto the bar. Someone in the street throws a wild punch that gets Jace in the jaw and he sits down on the pavement, hands twitching uncontrollably. Kallist grabs his hand or claps him on the back, and the pain stops Jace’s breath. It’s safe as long as where people touch him is covered, and so it’s just as well that Jace feels naked when he’s wearing less than three years; by and large it’s served him well. He’s getting along fine.

The shadow cast on his success so far is that it means he is hurt near-exclusively by people he (loves?) (trusts?) _likes_. He stops in to see Emmara and she puts her hand on his, lightly, ungloved, and he successfully hides his initial flinch, the growing anguish at the regular shocks when she doesn’t let go. (Which—he doesn’t want her to, even though he wants the _pain_ to stop. Her hand is so soft. Jace is still mystified; do friends do this? She seems worried.) Jace can’t tell what’s going on. She’s already always uneasy about his work.

But Kallist. Kallist is the worst, by far. He keeps touching Jace, and now Jace notices it more than he ever did, and he _can’t_ tell Kallist he’s hurting him. Jace is sure Kallist already blames himself for the collar. To tell him that it’s hurting Jace, to tell him _he’s_ hurting Jace—Jace can’t. He can’t.

When he’s alone Jace runs his hands over the collar, looking for a weak point, looking for some idea of how it works. Anything. He can feel the contact plates against his skin, smooth and evenly spaced, but the outside is just leather and the loop and buckle have no seams. The leather is slowly worn even smoother under Jace’s frantic, increasingly hopeless hands.

And he doesn’t know why Tezzeret is _bothering_. Jace doesn’t touch people. People don’t touch Jace. It’s visible in how little impact the collar is having at all: sometimes people brush up against him, sometimes they hit him, and Jace has two friends in the world. That’s it. Why does Tezzeret _care_?

He hasn’t explained what it’s for, either. Jace has determined that the thing is telling Tezzeret something; whenever they’re alone he’s had Jace jerk his shirt down far enough to let Tezzeret drum the fingers of his right hand against the collar, once, twice, and then let Jace cover himself back up. There’s some kind of data transmission happening, Jace can almost _taste_ it when he’s not distracted by the tiny sympathetic sparks set off by the tapping claws. But he doesn’t know what Tezzeret knows and he doesn’t know what he’s planning.

The collar sits neatly just below the tops of all of Jace’s shirts, under the collar of his cloak. It’s too comfortable, he thinks, to be coincidence. Jace begins trying to ask Tezzeret if— _when_ , damn it—he’s going to take it off.

In the meantime he does as he is told, and he hurts people as little as he can within the parameters he’s given. (It isn’t much.) Jace gets better at hiding pain. He gets better at flinching, and at pretending he isn’t. He wears the leather around his neck smooth and the metal hardware shiny with anxious unquiet hands.

But it’s fine. He’s fine.

* * *

The ironic thing about being agonizingly aware of a given presence is that it throws absences into sharp relief. Jace is more sensitive to touch than ever, craves human contact more for all that it’s entwined with pain. The weight and constriction of clothing helps; the _collar_ helps, and isn’t that its own form of awful. And he’s much more aware of the tiny bit of contact he gets that _doesn’t_ hurt.

Tezzeret doesn’t touch Jace on purpose, the way, for example, Kallist does. But he doesn’t shy away like other people do. So there are still just—brushes—human warmth on him, when Tezzeret’s too impatient to tell Jace how and where to move and moves Jace himself, or when Jace knocks himself half-unconscious on the floor, again, and Tezzeret picks him up anyway. And it doesn’t hurt. After weeks, the absence of pain is a—figurative—shock in itself, is itself pleasurable when it should be neutral. When Kallist or Emmara touch him Jace has to force himself not to jerk away; when Tezzeret touches him Jace has to stop from leaning in.

Which would be fine—it could be fine, it _would_ —if Jace weren’t also going into heat. He’s sure no one can tell, not even Tezzeret; after that afternoon with Kallist, Jace worked enchantments that could support permanent illusions into the walls of his room, his bed, and his cloak, for when the spells he does while awake aren’t enough. So no one will ever catch him off guard again. And his conscious illusions are up in every waking moment, so when Jace is awake no one can tell what he is and Jace’s own senses are dulled defensively. He can still tell Tezzeret’s an alpha, betas off the street can tell Tezzeret’s an alpha, but it doesn’t affect him much beyond the degree to which he acts on the knowledge alone. Nothing—embarrassing, nothing unguarded, not like what happened with Kallist. Even when the hunger starts creeping up on him.

Jace’s body is doing all kinds of things to convince him that the incipient heat is an excellent idea. By and large it’s backfiring. Heightened sensory input just means spending more time cold, in pain, or both. The fear keeps his head clear when he’s around people, lets him ignore his body. The only other effect it has on him is reminding him why illusions are vital.

Jace knows his illusion work is good. He’s been fooling betas for as long as he can remember (which, admittedly, isn’t that long). Alphas and other omegas are more of a problem, both because they’re better equipped to find him and because there’s fewer to practice on. But since the time early on when Tezzeret had Jace upgrade the illusions until they could fool _him_ , Jace’s control has never slipped around him once.

By now he thinks—or at least hopes—that Tezzeret has functionally forgotten Jace is an omega. In the absence of any sensory reminder, balancing the abstract knowledge with the absence of stimuli when there should be something visceral should create a mental disjunct which makes remembering unintuitive. Jace doesn’t exactly get the inverse of that. It is perpetually, painfully obvious that Tezzeret is an alpha; not only like he’s never bothered to hide it (why _would_ he, if it gives him an edge over people, Jace has thought, experimenting with borrowing Tezzeret’s brand of logic) but like he hasn’t even thought about it. He takes up space in a way Jace can’t understand or imitate; Baltrice towers over Tezzeret when they’re side-by-side but never seems to dwarf him. And it feels like his scent is everywhere in the damn compound, in varying degrees of intensity. Or maybe it’s on Jace. Jace aggressively does not put words to it. That would be thinking about it too much.

All in all Jace could do with being reminded of Tezzeret’s status less.

But it’s fine. Jace is fine. He keeps busy, he keeps out of trouble, he keeps away from other people. He’s already an expert at not addressing things and working around them; the only time the situation—collar, heat—really comes to mind and won’t leave is when he’s alone with nothing to do. And Jace studiously avoids that.

So only then, at the end of the day in the space before sleep, does Jace let himself think. The inexorable force that is oncoming heat washes over him, more intense for the day’s absence, and the anxiety that comes with it. Even Tezzeret can’t get angry at Jace for disappearing once it hits, he’s sure (pretty sure). Jace can just drop off the face of Ravnica.

Figuratively; planeswalking in altered states is dangerous. He should stay somewhere that isn’t unfamiliar.

Jace adds more locks, magical and physical, while he’s refining his illusion enchantments. Against orders, he even adds one magic layer that will open for no one whatsoever. He stockpiles water and changes of bedding in case he has the presence of mind to want either. And as far as preparation goes, that’s about it. Jace will handle this like he has the few previous heats he’s dealt with: lock himself away and get through it as quickly as he can.

The back of his mind has _thoughts_ on what “getting through it” should entail. Jace doesn’t really know what Ravnican omegas do to deal with heats—especially ones without a relationship or a bond to fall back on—but this is Ravnica: if a demand exists, someone will be selling.

So it’s late at night, near the end of the third week he’s been collared, when it occurs to Jace that he wouldn’t have to deal with things on his own. Money is entirely irrelevant to him at this scale. Instead of suffering alone or violating a friendship by asking, the situation could make actual _sense_ , an exchange Jace can understand with someone he won’t have to see again.

He’d dismiss the idea out of hand, but contact during heats does help end them sooner; the more physical, the more sexual, and the more sustained the better. And Jace has no affection for the process itself, no desire to make it last longer than necessary, no expectation that he’ll enjoy it beyond what’s physical, momentary, and embarrassing. The sooner he can stop being useless, the better. He can just… seek out an alpha sex worker ( _where_ —Rakdos, maybe?), bring them back to some more rural Consortium safe house no one uses, wipe the person’s mind of identifying details before they leave, once he has his sense of self back.

Jace curls up on his side, lights down, feeling a sense of lightness as his brain goes back to ruminating on imagined touches; if he doesn’t put a face to the hands he imagines, if he pretends it’s a stranger who _is_ actually getting something out of touching him, some of the guilt goes away.

He’s not entirely absolved: he’d be taking advantage of anyone he hired, still, through the difference in power between them if nothing else, and he’d have to erase parts afterwards; Jace is unfortunately recognizable, and Tezzeret’s enemies are his. But at least it wouldn’t be like asking—say—Kallist, someone who’d feel they were hurting him if they said no. And there’d be some level of renumeration for their trouble, for having to deal with the mess he knows he’ll become.

He loses himself for a little while; any contact would be better than cold sheets and his own hands. Only—

Jace’s blood runs cold. Only the one person who can touch him without hurting him is, still, Tezzeret. The pain from sustained touch, with his nerves sensitized, would be immense. He hooks a finger in the loop of his collar and jerks to snap himself out of it, and the shame and guilt he’d avoided come down on him fivefold.

Without looking, Jace throws up another layer of complexity on the enchantment locks, a barely tweaked replica of the ones already on his room, then arms the lot of them. He’s close. And he will _not_ rope anyone else into it.


	4. Chapter 4

As he drifts off to sleep there’s still a point where Jace loses control of his thoughts, and these days that inevitably means thinking about sex. It’s getting a bit old, and he’s not even gone into heat yet. On the other hand, when he’s in heat he won’t be able to mind, so maybe he’s getting it all out of the way now.

Jace doesn’t really know how he’d want to be touched; eavesdropping with his mind he’s picked up that there’s great variation in what people ask of each other. Three-quarters unconscious and unselfconscious with it, he wonders what he’d like. He lets himself imagine someone—faceless, guiltless—with gentle, insistent hands, stroking down his neck until Jace goes limp enough for them to run their other hand up the inside of his thigh, parting his legs softly but inexorably. Maybe they’d make him beg for them to go further than leaving fingertips at the join between his leg and hip, still stroking the back of his neck so his pleas are barely coherent.

But someone touching his neck would run into the collar. And the collar—

Jace’s sense memory shocks him, violent and sharp as if to make up for the delay. He whines and flinches, but at some point he must have slipped into sleep, because he can’t make the now disorientingly soft contact stop. Jace feels tears start in his eyes. He can’t move his lips, so he tries to shout with his mind, _Please, please make it stop, please it hurts._

The hands disappear and Jace sobs with relief. A single hand replaces them, its owner’s motions much sharper and more purposeful. But they don’t hurt. That’s the important part. Jace lets himself be examined, manhandled into a more exposed position, their hand stroking his cock just enough times to make him whimper at the loss when they move on. Two fingers test how wet he is, how open, how close to a proper heat. He doesn’t open his eyes.

Then something long and hard and _cold_ is inside him, and it moves once and Jace is coming, finally, the stranger stroking him through it.

Even in his sleep, orgasm means a moment of clarity, a brief reprieve from the crushing tide of hormones his body subjects him to. The evidence clicks; he resists it. He realizes the new person has a scent and that he knows what it is, and he wants that to be enough to kill his desire, to let him wake up.

Instead he’s squirming down on his imaginary Tezzeret’s fingers in short order, and his other hand closes over Jace’s neck like he’s known how wretchedly sensitive Jace is there all along. His metal hand adds another finger—two? three?—and Jace pants through the impossible stretch, can’t still his hips and can’t make himself want to. It doesn’t hurt, now, still; it’s not Jace’s hands and it doesn’t _hurt_ , and that’s enough to make it suffocatingly, inconceivably good.

Warm, human fingers trace the divide between Jace’s collar and his neck, and he tries to arch into them, his whole body humming. Tezzeret’s hand moves upward, slipping into Jace’s mouth, and more than anything Jace is caught with a wash of gratitude that he’s been given something to do. He licks, hollows his cheeks, and when Tezzeret adds _another_ finger and pulls his hand away to flatten his palm on Jace’s throat the sensation’s too much, it’s too much, and his mouth goes lax as he comes, gasping for air that’s not entirely there.

On top of it all, the dominating sensation is still the lack of pain. Jace didn’t know that the absence of pain could be a sensation. Dream-Jace has forgotten how to be anything but grateful for it.

* * *

When Jace wakes up he changes his sheets and hates himself. On the other hand, he has the presence of mind to hate himself; the heat’s held off for one more day. Two thoughts war in his head: if anyone knows their dreams aren’t their fault, it should be the telepath; but if anyone can control their dreaming self, it should be Jace. He strikes a bargain with himself that he’ll learn how as soon as he can.

He wonders briefly if it _wasn’t_ a dream, then dismisses it. None of his wards have been tripped, he can’t conceptualize a reason why Tezzeret would want him anyway, and even if he did Jace cannot imagine Tezzeret staying silent that long, especially if Jace himself were nonverbal.

Jace drops the wards on his door that go against orders and dresses with shaking hands. It’s mere luck that Tezzeret’s the first person to look at him—people he passes in the hallways look studiously away—and snap that Jace should do his shirt up; he’d left his collar in plain view.

Jace is still fidgeting with it during Tezzeret’s actual debrief, since it gives him something better to do than look at Tezzeret (considering Jace’s night) or Baltrice (considering she’s Baltrice). He’s having trouble focusing. The warm haze in his head is starting to bleed into the day. So when Baltrice snaps he doesn’t know what she’s reacting to.

“Boss, you want me to do _what_?” she says, making an abrupt gesture with her hand.

Neither of them are paying enough attention, and Jace stands at her elbow height; her knuckles crack against Jace’s face, her enough—though at a fraction of her strength—to make him wobble on his feet.

The hard, bright pain from her hand mixes with the immediate shock, cool and sharp, and Jace feels his cock stiffen in his pants.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Baltrice says. “I did not actually mean to do that.” There’s an unspoken _for once_ , or maybe _this time_. Jace is barely listening, still buzzing with pain.

And, apparently, with something other than pain.

_Shit._


	5. Chapter 5

The heat takes him that night.

Jace has only been in heat a couple times before, little enough that when he wakes up somewhere between midnight and the early morning he doesn’t immediately know what’s going on. His mind is foggy and his skin feels like it’s on fire, but when he throws off the covers the shock of cold hurts. Jace scrambles to wrap himself up again, shivering pathetically.

At first he thinks he’s sick. But other than the burning chill, he feels fine. He tries to stretch out, preparing to stand up, but when his thighs rub together he gasps and goes still. He’s evident so wet that he’s been leaking, leaving the backs of his thighs and between his legs sticky and damp. Even alone, it’s humiliating.

Without really thinking about it, though, he’s rubbing two fingers against himself, some animal part of his brain assessing how easily they slide before he forces them inside his body. Jace is in heat and he has small hands besides; it’s not enough. He manages three, then four, and that does hurt, but the stretch makes up for what he’s missing in length and angle somewhat. If he could get his hand in up to the wrist, though. That might be enough, but it feels impossible. He shoves the four fingers as deep as he can, unshaped noises falling out of his mouth, and spreads them—a spark of pain, a spark of pleasure, there’s no real difference—then curls them in on themselves, wondering if he can at least hit his prostate and—

_There._ He comes, technically. Jace barely feels it. Orgasm means he stops breathing for an instant, muscles seizing and then relaxing involuntarily; more of him’s sticky in a way that’s sort of abstractly unpleasant, and a tiny bit of mental clarity comes back. It does nothing for the howling need inside him, which, Jace knows from experience, is only going to get worse. He can smell his own desperation, already, on every inhale, his body trying to signal to any human who’s breathing that someone should fuck him.

But he can _think_ , if only a little. Jace clumsily adds to the cocoon of illusions surrounding him, makes himself outright invisible. There’s no time to check his work. Hopefully it holds. He pulls his fingers out resentfully, cursing involuntary and heartfelt, and rolls over, and starts to think about another set of illusions much more carefully.

The way Jace sees it, there are four kinds of illusions. They can be made to produce something that isn’t there or to obscure what is, and they can exist outside the mind so the senses take in false information organically or reach directly into a single mind and provide direct stimulus. Jace needs practice at veiling what is and at direct neural stimulation, it’s why his last illusion in case anyone should still make it into the room probably wouldn’t hold up well. And when he’s in his right mind, Jace has a healthy caution against testing magic on himself. But he’s _not_ in his right mind, and maybe…

Jace does his best to focus, and reaches inside his brain. If he can just… skirt around the kinds of things that happened in his dream.

What does Jace want?

He wavers. The vulgar fact is that Jace’s body wants to be fucked and filled with come for as long as humanly, physically possible. But what does _Jace_ want?

He toys with sensations, somewhat disconnected from the fact that entertaining ideas alone is leaving him panting. The only animate things he’s had inside himself are fingers; he doesn’t feel up to doing more than drawing on that. But he can give himself a hand on his inner thigh, parting his legs and exposing him. Another hand rubbing at his rim, not anywhere near enough, just _toying_ with him while he whines, unable to collect the words to beg. An imagined someone touches his cock, in feather-light strokes.

Jace pauses.

That’s three hands.

_Oh._

It’s hard to want things for himself. But he can conceptualize people wanting something from him; and so, with a mental stretch, he can imagine being wanted. Jace has the anonymous hands blindfold him, hold him down—no violence, no unneeded force, just preventing him from moving any way they don’t want him to—and wander over his body. Warm, rhythmic motions on his neck make him go limp, while the owner of the first pair of hands finally gets a finger inside him. They stroke and curl like they’re trying to get Jace off on as little as that alone.

He mewls, a soft high noise, and in response there are fingers tracing his lips delicately. The contact makes him shiver. The hand at the back of his neck disappears, then gets a finger into the loop of his collar and jerks him forward. Jace’s mouth opens in a gasp and is immediately filled with two fingers, which start thrusting—in, out, in, out, getting his lips warm with friction and slick with spit. The single finger inside him just twists.

Jace isn’t keeping track of the sounds he’s making; they’re no one’s concern but his own, and he doesn’t care to know. He can feel himself vocalize, though, from moans to whines to futile attempts at words, the sound caught in his throat, vibrating against his collar and the fingers fucking his mouth.

Suddenly two more fingers are inside him. The angle feels—wrong, somehow, how independently they’re moving. Thrust in, twist, scissor out; a regular pattern, but out of sync with the first one—

His face goes hot. More so, anyway. There are two people inside him, testing—well. Testing how he’d feel to fuck, too impatient to wait turns. Jace’s mental crowd have been awfully patient so far, overall; maybe they share that opinion, wanting to actually get themselves inside him. A third person could probably fit a finger more, while a fourth would be stuck rubbing where the other digits disappear inside him.

And much of him is unexploited yet: hands raking nails across his ribs, toying with his nipples, pulling his legs further up and apart. Someone could hook a finger into the corner of his mouth to force it wider, so the two fingers there can turn into three and the thrusts can be almost brutal, like—simulating the real thing is still daunting, though now he wants it—like someone actually fucking his face. (There’s a kind of pretension there, that a part of him not meant for sex, not meant to be penetrated is still there for someone’s pleasure; he should hate it; he shivers.)

With a dozen hands, Jace wrings orgasm after orgasm out of himself, driving himself further into heat; each is slightly stronger, the spike in pleasure actually noticeable, until his body has nothing left to give. He’s absurdly wet, his face is marked by spit and tears, and he’s exhausted.

Jace falls into mercifully dreamless sleep.


End file.
